"that very few people like him as a president."

That's not really true if you talk to people. He is also being helped by the fact that the democrats have not much to offer either. I bet almost anybody except Clinton would have won the election.

> The people chose him as their president

Well, he did get almost as many votes as the top vote getter, so that's almost true.

As am American, that's exactly what I thought when I read GP's comment.

The losing side is always more emotional and vocal in politics. The winning side has nothing to prove, except during a re-election. It was that way for Bush, Obama, Trump, and it will be true of the next President.

he lost the popular vote but thanks to the Electoral College won the presidency

Because, of course, he campaigned to the Electoral College (put advertising effort where the most Electoral College votes could be leveraged). Why the Democrats didn't do this is appalling.

> Because, of course, he campaigned to the Electoral College

Regardless of the validity of this argument as to Constitutional legitimacy, it's inapplicable to th claim made upthread which is that “the people chose him as their President”. They did not.

The electoral college determines the presidency, so Trump and Hillary campaigned for the electoral college, and Trump won.

If the popular vote won the presidency, Trump and Hillary would have campaigned for the popular vote, and there's no way of knowing what that outcome would have been.

That's what the mass media, which is skewed to the left, wants you to think. The truth is that his approval rating is doing okay, and it's especially good for republican voters.

> and it's especially good for republican voters.

This is true, but maybe not for the reasons you think. The number of people who self-identify as "Republican" has shrunk considerably over the past few years. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2018/06/14/trump-owns-...

Republican Party ID is up (at the expense of independents; Democratic ID is the same) from when Trump was elected.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/15370/party-affiliation.aspx

Huh! The Brooking's story actually cites this Gallup data. But it's a little out of date. Looks like Republican ID has sprung back up in the last ~6 months. Touché!

It's really noisy poll-to-poll; really, I'd be skeptical of anyone claiming that there is much of a meaningful trend based on it. Pew’s series which separately tracks partisans and leaners might be more useful for spotting trends, but they do take seem to have really recent data public in that series.

Trump's approval rating is really not doing OK. It's mediocre. Not Nixon or GWB-at-the-end-of-his-term bad, but an unbiased observer would not call being down 12 points "OK". https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/

Yes, but I think it's perfectly normal given how politics works now. Everything is becoming more polarised.

> I think it's perfectly normal given how politics works now.

Yes, Trump's approval rating is dead average for President’s taking office after the end of Obama’s second term at the same point in their term of office.

But unless you reduce the domain so much that you compare Trump only to himself, it's not perfectly normal.

Albeit, it is slightly stranger in the Trump situation as the majority of voters didn't actually choose him as their president. Not to mention the fact that voter turnout is rather low in the US compared to most other democratic countries.